Punk Povera is a group exhibition situating recent work in painting, drawing, sculpture and video from Los Angeles and Mexico City in relation to two histories: Arte Povera, the Italian art movement of the late 1960s that employed radical processes using simple materials; and punk rock music, fashion and art from the UK and the US in the 1970s. These were urban art forms that eschewed the excesses of their respective mainstream contemporaries in order to challenge, disrupt, and defy constraints, both social and artistic, and they serve as a conceptual foundation and opening gambit here.
Opening reception
Saturday, January 16, 2016
6pm – 9pm
WUHO’s location on Hollywood Boulevard between Wilcox and Schraber has also shaped this show. The street itself is a richly sedimentary trash heap of popular culture, and it has always been in the middens that past histories have been best preserved.
The strategic identifications with time and place central to this exhibition are not the province of irony, cynicism, or despair. Instead, they are an exercise in good faith and represent what Thomas Lawson calls a “last exit,” a radically transformative process in which art becomes a vehicle for subversion and a means to deconstruct the illusions of the present.
Punk Povera – Exhibiting Artists
Gina Arizpe, Steven Bankhead, Gary Cannone, Irisdan Corley, Carla Danes, Cristóbal Gracia, Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez, Bridget Kane, Jason Keller, Mike Kelley, Nicholas Kersulis, Iván Krassoievitch, Thomas Lawson, Albert Lopez, Sandy Rodriguez, Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba, Joaquin Segura, Manuel Solano, Sergio Torres Torres, Jason Triefenbach
Curator: Amy Pederson Converse
